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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Millipede - Realms

(Dead Pilot, 2011)

What I think about when I am listening to Realms:

Four heavy beasts, horned and tusked both—dark, gorgeous, mammoth-sized beasts—each roped around the neck and pulling, the four of them, an enormous coffin. The scene is painted over groggily in pre-dawn mist, the heavy breath of the beasts, pockets of ethereal fog and a long-tailed parade of torch flames held in the memorial convoy. The coffin drags laboriously, scoring the earth like a massive plow, grinding against the rocks and soil; a cacophony dirge in its wake. The kingly funeral procession of a darkened lord.

Realms is what it sounds like in the mourners' hearts. What's ringing in their ears. The appropriate requiem song.

Realms is also the third full-length album of Chattanooga guitar slayer, Joseph Davenport, AKA Millipede. His magnum opus. And, appropriately, (finally), his first album pressed to wax.

There has always been a certain sense of masochism present in the Millipede sound palette. A trenchant abrasiveness and acerbic pop that’s warded off weak-boned, weak-bodied, weak-eared listeners. (An otherworldly loudness.) Realms is similarly abrasive, but the sorrowful gorgeousness that has long been lurking beneath Davenport's mordantly slathered guitar is finally dawning in a way that makes Realms a perfect entry point into the Millipede sound-world. But this isn't simply an entry point, Realms is it: the genuine article: a massive melting pot of beauty and ugly, perhaps the true nature of what it means to experience the deathlinks of life and come away with two lung-fulls of air and circulating heart.